"Insurers are not prepared to seamlessly integrate with the future of transportation."

This was one astounding conclusion that our project team came to at the end of our 4 week sprint. Through 16 days, 11 participants, 5 companies, and 4 partnerships, we inferred that the auto insurance industry needs to move quickly to adapt to the shifting change in risk.

Amongst the hottest innovation trends today, Blockchain is often mentioned. Although Blockchain is often just associated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, this technology has enormous potential to impact the future customer experience. From our first collaborative Blockchain project, we've learned that countless insurance use cases are ripe for exploration. These use cases span from back office improvements, fraud detection, to positively impacting the role of insurance from the consumer's perspective.

Let's take a moment and think about what the future of insurance will look like once Blockchain is widely used and implemented.

What can you accomplish in 24 hours when you bring together a group of curious thinkers?

Cookhouse Lab hosted our first free Innovation Challenge Event last week and the topic of interest was machine learning. Machine learning has been a definite hot topic for manual process optimization in any industry, and our participants were taken through a condensed Cookhouse Lab innovation sprint towards creating insurance specific use cases.

It has been six months since the Cookhouse Lab opened its doors to the insurance industry with the vision of making insurance better. There have been several amazing co-creation projects to date including Insurance Loyalty & Rewards and Blockchain Use Cases For Insurance. Each of these produced valuable outputs for the individual participating member insurance companies, and the Delays in APS project was no different. This project is the first since the inception of our lab (though we anticipate many more) that delivered a solution scope for an industry minimum viable product.

"Coming up with an idea is the easy part. Bringing that idea to life is the difficult part"

This advice was given to me very early on in my career but still rings true every time I embark on a new innovation project. As innovation professionals can attest to, it is the vetted business value of an innovation that is one of the most difficult elements to overcome when applying for budget or devising a go-to-market strategy.

As the team worked towards the end of the project,thefocus wason business casing, and the due diligence supporting the features of the newly created digital experience. All of which were in an attempt to deliver business value planned from the beginning of the project.Some examples of these can be seen below.

"The needs of insurers are not aligned to the needs of customers"

Often times, driven by profitability and shareholder return, corporations continue to find it a challenge to align their financial goals with customer needs. This opportunity, although identified early on in the project, continues to be a key theme for the project. The common situation that seemed to arise when comparing customer feedback to insurer feedback, was that insurers tend towards communicating by their products while customers tend to only understand insurance within their own context.

We have now passed the half way mark of our project journey. The team has made fantastic progress so far, iterating through the design thinking journey. Combining design thinking and lean startup methodologies, the team has completed version one of the insurance loyalty and rewards MVP based on end user feedback.

Innovation can be sparked through a variety of different ways. Sometimes, the spark comes from sheer necessity but other times, it can be born through an “Aha!” moment from a high-pressure environment.

Personally, I am a fan of innovation through the approach of “friendly competition.” Without some form of pressure (whether it be friendly or not), it is hard to innovate effectively.